Bibliography Formats

Introduction

There are a multitude of different formats in which bibliographical information can be stored. Unfortunately, there is no one "best" format, nor one "best" piece of software to access the data. What this document attempts to do is to serve as an information source about a number of different formats. Writing a converter, or just trying to understand what you've been handed by a colleague, should be easier.

Some of the commercial packages, such as EndNote or Reference Manager, have packages that will read and write a multitude of formats. Eyal Doron, the author of BibDB for DOS, recently announced that his next version of BibDB will support multiple formats. I haven't looked at it, but his address is doron@mickey.mpi-hd.mpg.de. The bp package has the eventual goal of being able to read, write, and convert between a number of formats.

Contents

This list is by no means comprehensive. If you have information about a format others may be interested in also, send it to me, and I can add it to the list.

Other Resources
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17 January 1995
Dana Jacobsen
dana@acm.org